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Nica Power launched its new V7-designed site at www.nicapower.com. Two months earlier, the fifteen year-old company committed to the web as an integral part of its marketing strategy in 1999 and beyond. Nica identified
three key objectives for the future. First, the Nica site should support sales efforts to tap new market opportunities. Second, the site should focus customer attention on the vast Nica catalog of batteries, chargers power accessories, and custom solutions. And third, pave the way for dynamic content and a full ecommerce channel.
In the ongoing challenge to realize these objectives V7 has developed a new graphic identity for Nica. Replacing a rather dated type-based logo with a stronger, contemporary design that emphasizes the dynamic potential of the company's product line in the online marketplace. It had to work well within the colour and resolution restrictions
of the screen, and translate well to print for business documents and collateral. It's interesting to note the change in approach here, with the web taking the lead, rather than following the print applications in the development cycle.
With the new logo in place, we turned our attention to site architecture. We needed to accommodate an audience split between first-time visitors and repeat customers; providing general information to the former without unduly delaying the latter. Our planning resulted in a blueprint that recognized these divergent browsing expectations - new
visitors would enter through the corporate front door at www.nicapower.com, while existing customers would access the catalog back door at www.nicapower.com/catalog. Nica endorsed the plan.
This structure also allowed us to separate the catalog's heavy table data from the rest of the site by moving to a frame-based layout in the catalog itself. The site's corporate front end was designed without frames while the backend benefited from frame divisions between navigation and content. The site's next iteration will see the product
tables generated dynamically from a source database, remotely hosted by Nica's ISP.
We used external style sheets to reduce the file size of the tables in the catalog, without sacrificing control over formatting. We wrote a custom JavaScript that dynamically created the necessary frameset for the catalog rather than hard coding numerous static frameset documents. Our aim was to make the business end of the site as lightweight
and responsive as possible. The jump to dynamic data will further reduce the page overhead in the catalog.
The front door was enlivened with a bypassable Flash multimedia intro, and the home page features an integrated marketing banner in its navigation bar that was also created in Flash. Finally, we encouraged Nica's decision to register a new domain at nicapower.com. We both saw this as a higher profile address than the original nica.ca.
Initial statistics for the first month indicate site traffic has doubled. We attribute this to the effectiveness of the new design, Nica's efforts to promote the site with customers and ongoing search engine/directory submissions by V7. Work continues on the site. The web is a work in progress and we're committed to continuing that progress
for Nica as the future unfolds.
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